Using foyer at school with Pi

Hi!

Your suggested setup is pretty standard, no advantages or disadvantages there.

Foyer should run fine on the Pi, if you keep your slides and channels simple. Because the Pi is not a very powerful machine some effects will be choppy or will not work at all. For example the fade and slide transitions do not work from my experience; use ‘No transition’ instead. And YouTube videos do not work on the Pi.

Not sure if the Video slide (using uploaded video) works on the Pi — would be great if you could try it out and let us know ??

Best,
Menno

I have two Raspberry Pi 3 B running my setup.

1: Server) normal Raspberry running Raspbian Lite. On it I have WordPress with Foyer and MariaDB running in a Docker environment.

2: Display) normal Raspberry running Raspbian Desktop. With the default setup it was not possible to use the video slide or a slide with a video background showing videos from YouTube. I had to tweak the setup first. A) giving the GPU 256 Mb of RAM. B) moving the swap partition off the SD card into the physical RAM with 4 blocks with 64MB in size with compression enabled (zram) C) tweaking the chrome://flags of the Chromium Browser to enable GPU acceleration and modifying the startup script of the same with hidden flags normally not accessible via the settings UI.

Now my corporate digital signage is able to run 1080p videos from YouTube. I have currently 10 slides in average including 2 videos. One is a commercial with 27 sec and the other one is about 1:30 min. When I changed the later one to a 3 min video it was buffering more and it was not that smooth.

Next week I can share more of my documentation and commands I use to setup my system.

How is the system now running? I’m investigating a similar use case but looking at Screenly OSE vs Foyer.

I am still trying the following:
– install wordpress on a separate 32-bit windows pc using Laragon, then add foyer to wordpress and thus make some great slides.
A great addition to foyer is that now, local videos can be used to be displayed so this tackles some privacy-issues, for instance: is it allowed to place video of children (from our school) on public accessible systems (eg youtube), even when parents have given permission to use images and videos of their kids. By only running the vids local, these aren’t publicly available.
The only snag I ran into, is getting the wordpress pc to act as a ‘real’ webserver. As for Foye, it is great, with some simple intructions anyone can edit the slides. The big pro is that it has all functions needed, a pretty no-nonsense extention.

Hey @bangel, very interesting! You achieved what I couldn’t: make the Pi play YouTube video backgrounds, fantastic! Did you also try the new local video background? How is that running on your Pi?

Care to share your tweaked Raspbian Desktop image with other Foyer users?

@passepartouthor thanks! Did you try the new local video background, and how does that work on your Pi?

Hey @bangel

Next week I can share more of my documentation and commands I use to setup my system.

Did you already have some time to set up some documentation?

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by mvdhorst.

Hi,

I’ve tried all kinds of stuff for moving the swap into memory,

moving the swap partition off the SD card into the physical RAM with 4 blocks with 64MB

but

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/var/swap file 102396 0 -2

remains. Any clues?

I don’t have enough Pi experience to tweak system settings like that, but I can recommend the paid version of Raspberry Digital Signage (as Pi operating system):

https://nl.www.ads-software.com/plugins/foyer/#can%20i%20use%20a%20raspberry%20pi%20mini-computer%20for%20my%20digital%20sign%3F